Suns continue to roll, stump Pacers again

Winning four games on the road in five nights is about as impossible a task as there is for an NBA team to pull off.

Even if three of those games are against the dregs of the Eastern Conference, punctuating such a stretch with your second win over the league-leading Indiana Pacers deserves a great deal of respect.

That's what the Phoenix Suns went out and earned on Thursday, beating the Pacers 102-94, their fourth road win in five nights. It's also their sixth win in the past seven games, a stretch that also included a 124-100 drubbing of this same Pacers team.

Not only has Phoenix hung 226 points on the league's best defense in the span of two weeks, they also handed Indiana just their second home loss of the season. In the process, they've posted the three highest-scoring halves any team has put up against Indiana all season.

What, exactly, do the Suns know that the rest of the league doesn't?

It's kind of unclear. It's not like the Suns are dominating from any one area - they're not hitting an insane rate on threes (it's been good, but not any crazy volume) or from mid-range, and they're not getting to the line an incredible amount.

Instead, they've used a pretty balanced scoring attack, protected the ball and turned the rebounding effort into a scratch-affair. None of those are easy things to accomplish, especially against a defense as strong and disciplined as Indiana's, but they've managed...twice.

On Thursday, Goran Dragic played through a swollen left elbow to drop 28 points on 11-of-21 shooting but he was the only player to score more than 16. In the previous meeting, nobody topped 23. On Thursday, the Suns defense clamped down early, creating too big a hole for Indiana to climb out of, and played smart ball from there.

If this all seems circuitous, that's because it is. It's not clear what edge the Suns have on the Pacers, otherwise a team as smart as Indiana wouldn't have been stumped twice in a row.

Instead, we're left to look at the 28-18 Suns, marvel at the job Jeff Hornacek is doing behind the bench and just enjoy the hell out of them.